The Death of a Tyrant
The night stopped. The gentle breeze that swept in during the evening to cool Tokyo-3 had expired, all memories of what happened merely hours before were now a distant, fading picture. The drumming cadence of the cicadas in the tree overhead came to an indefinite pause as Misato Katsuragi peered over her dashboard to inspect the front of her car wrapped around the trunk. Deathly afraid to look behind her, she remained motionless in her seat, letting her chocolate brown eyes drift down past the dashboard to gaze at the passengers seat, which was smothered by the left end of the leg guard and the contents of her glove compartment, which was forced open at the moment of impact and set forth an explosion of paper. Her breathing grew ragged as a sharp pain in her leg finally begged to be noticed. C'mon, Misato, she thought, grinding her teeth together to suppress any moan of agony that would escape her lips. Pull it together.
But she couldn't. The images of the crash were burned into the back of her mind, replaying themselves over and over again in rapid succession. The road was too slick. Had she known, she wouldn't have jerked the wheel so hard to swerve out of his way. But she did. The car fishtailed, and the whole back end slammed into him like a sledgehammer, sending him flying into the street and skidding across the pavement.
"A goddamned pedestrian," she breathed, gazing out of her shattered side window to view the winding mountain road that she ran off of. Even in this state of confusion and shock, she still had to wonder why someone would be walking around that far from the city in the middle of the night. Granted, Tokyo-3 had more than its fair share of crazies and homeless, but none that ventured so far from the root that fueled their vagrancy. But she had been proven wrong that night, and she paid for it with dire consequences. Her head was still turned from where she knew he would be lying, even more discouraged that there were no sounds coming from that direction. No screams, no groans, only silence. Slowly, quietly, she turned her head and looked beyond the rear window. A crumpled mass lay on the street, only a silhouette in the dark that bordered the final ring of light from the dim street lamp.
It wasn't moving.
Misato's stomach tightened, and suddenly she felt like she was going to throw up. Horror began to spread across her face like an infectious plague, and suddenly she was compelled to step outside of the car's twisted frame. She winced in pain as she bore her weight on her leg, but was relieved to find that she could stand. Her eyes still locked on shapeless lump on the pavement, she limped towards it. Her nausea was soon amplified with a nagging sensation in the back of her mind as she drew closer. For some reason, something was familiar….
She wagged the notion out of her head, but paused for a brief moment when the full reality of what had just occurred struck. An involuntary gasp escaped her soft lips, and she stumbled to catch her balance. Once she steadied herself, another dreadful reality popped into her brain: She had absolutely no idea what to do. Of course, there would be a situation in everyone's life that would leave them clueless, but to up to this point in her life, Misato had kept those situations to a bare minimum. She had damn near made a name for herself for her level-headedness alone. But now she stood a few feet away from a person who was almost certainly dead because of her, and she couldn't think of a plan.
"Maybe…maybe he was drunk.." she mumbled, forcing herself to take another step forward, squinting her eyes in the dark so she could get a clearer view of the shapeless form. Her eyes adjusted, and she made out the figure of a man. He was tall and lean with a blazer draped loosely over broad shoulders. A nice one, too, she commented to herself, not sure whether she was joking or not. It was probably suede, she decided. She took another step, and glass cracked underneath her foot. "Probably part of one of my windows," she said unsteadily as she lifted her foot. To her surprise, a pair of small wire framed glasses stared back at her. Her heel had crushed one of the lenses, but the other seemed to be in good shape. Almost unconsciously, she bent down and snatched them off the pavement, holding hem against the light of the streetlamp.
She tried her best to stifle the scream as she dropped the glasses back on the street, but couldn't. The glasses were tinted orange.